Late last year, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line reached out to EY for help. No, not tax or au- dit assistance, but rath- er to lead its effort to completely transform the line’s cruise vacations into a connected and high-tech experience on the high seas.
Royal Caribbean tapped EY for a
complete digital transformation
that touches everything from the
booking process for the customers
to the entire onboard experience to
the ships’ engines.

EY’s work with Royal Caribbean
highlights a new end-to-end digital
experience, including everything
from virtual reality dining experiences and shore excursions to onboard facial recognition software.

“Royal Caribbean hired us to
fundamentally transform the entire
cruise experience,” says Hank Prybylski. “They asked us to help them
with their digital journey; they wanted to completely transform their
end-to-end customer experience.”

And not only was the project a big
success for Royal Caribbean, but the
work, and the exposure it brought,
also led to several conversations
with other EY clients. “When Royal Caribbean held their SeaBeyond
event, we had ten banking clients
that wanted to go with us,” Prybylski says. “Why? Well, going through
this type of digital transformation
is not unique to the cruise industry. Banking clients are trying to
figure out how to completely transform their customer experience,
too. These problems, and solutions,
touch almost every industry.”

It’s this type of engagement, and
the synergies it creates within EY
and with its clients, that excites
Prybylski so much these days.

“EY needs to be the firm that’s
creating the most value for its clients through this transformative age.
Business models are changing and
clients want more innovation. We
want to be value navigators in the
transformative age,” Prybylski says.
“And secondly, we need to be the
leaders who fundamentally transform how consulting services are executed and delivered to clients. We
can’t think about consulting being
immune from digital disruption.”

To that end, he says EY thinks a
lot about how it proposes and delivers its services. “We execute our
services in a more collaborative way.
You can’t show up at a client and
say, ‘I’m going to be your value navigator for digital transformation and
here’s my 100-page PowerPoint.’
Those days are long gone.”

LEADING THE WAY

It’s been a little over six months
since Prybylski took over as Americas Vice Chair of Advisory Services
for Bob Patton, who has shifted roles
within EY. Patton is now Americas
Vice Chair of Accounts, but he handed off an Advisory Practice that’s in
great shape and growing.

During his tenure, Patton grew
Americas Advisory revenues from
$1.5 billion with 6,000 consultants
to $5 billion and 16,000 consultants.
On his watch, the firm also made
more than 25 strategic acquisitions.

Based in New York, Prybylski
brings more than 30 years of experience serving top-tier institutions within the financial services industry. In
Prybylski’s previous role as Americas
Advisory Performance Improvement
Leader, he led 7,000 consultants who
helped clients transform their supply
chain, finance, technology and operations. Under his leadership, the practice posted market-leading growth

over the past several years, including
an 18 percent increase in 2017.

Since taking over his new role,
Prybylski says he’s been keenly focused on asking some tough questions: “Do we have the services to
create new customer experiences,
employee experiences? What is the
experience we want to provide to our
clients? What is our workforce of the
future? Do we have the right balance
of skills for global delivery? Do we
have the right technical skills? How
do we deliver those services?”

To help answer them, he embarked on a client-listening tour
to gather feedback about their top
priorities and goals. “What I was
hearing from clients is completely
parallel to what I thought we needed
to focus on,” he says. “They need
to create momentum; they need to
move forward; they see a lot of opportunity; and, not surprisingly, they
have a fear of disruption.”

Prybylski says in the past, much
of EY’s work was highly focused—
helping companies migrate an application to the cloud, for instance.

“It was one function, one technology. That’s changing, clients are
asking us about fundamentally transforming their business; that’s the
future. We want to take the collective integration of what I’ll call the
digital ecosystem. This is an exciting
time for the EY consulting practice,
as client demand for connected solutions is on the rise.” Prybylski says.
“At EY, we’ve always been proud of
how purpose-driven we are. We are
proud to be focused on building a
better working world; leading with
purpose-led transformation. That’s
an anchor that Bob left us with and
we’ll continue that work.”

But part of a new EY is a freshen
up on that vision, complete with a
new branding campaign launched